I’m taking a break from coding to think about layout considerations; specifically, how do we fit the forums into what would be a very small, narrow screen like a phone?
Consider the index page: it’s a table of five columns with header rows. When you try and scale that down to a narrow viewport, you either end up with some very narrow, cramped columns; or you can try and stack the table cells, which causes problems with the header row.
What I’m thinking is to basically simplify the index for mobile screens so that only two columns show: the Forum column and the Last Post column. I think it makes sense to keep these because, in my experience, these are the main things people care about because they’re navigational. The other columns — post count etc — are more ancillary information that wouldn’t really be beneficial to keep for a mobile screen.
That then would leave the question of how best to lay the remaining sections out. My current thinking is to stack the columns like so:
(above: a terrible rough example)
But I’m interested to hear other ideas.